Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment

Climate extremes often imply significant impacts on human and natural systems, and these extreme events are anticipated to be among the potentially most harmful consequences of a changing climate. However, while extreme event impacts are increasingly recognized, methodologies to address such impacts and the degree of our understanding and prediction capabilities vary widely among different sectors and disciplines. Moreover, traditional climate extreme indices and large-scale multi-model intercomparisons that are used for future projections of extreme events and associated impacts often fall short in capturing the full complexity of impact systems.

Climate Extremes and Their Implications for Impact and Risk Assessment describes challenges, opportunities and methodologies for the analysis of the impacts of climate extremes across various sectors to support their impact and risk assessment. It thereby also facilitates cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary discussions and exchange among climate and impact scientists. The sectors covered include agriculture, terrestrial ecosystems, human health, transport, conflict, and more broadly covering the human-environment nexus. The book concludes with an outlook on the need for more transdisciplinary work and international collaboration between scientists and practitioners to address emergent risks and extreme events towards risk reduction and strengthened societal resilience.

• Provides an overview about past, present and future changes in climate and weather extremes and how to connect that knowledge to impact and risk assessment under global warming
• Presents different approaches to assess societal-relevant impacts and risk of climate and weather extremes, including compound events, and the complexity of risk cascades and the interconnectedness of societal risk
• Features applications across a diversity of sectors, including agriculture, health, ecosystem services and urban transport

Dr. Jana Sillmann is Research Director at the Center for International Climate Research (CICERO) in Oslo, Norway and leads the Climate Impacts group. She holds a doctoral degree in Earth system sciences and is an internationally well-recognized expert in the field of climate extremes. Dr. Sillmann is co-leading activities for the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Grand Challenges on Weather and Climate Extremes, she is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) program and is a Lead author of Chapter 12 (Climate change information for regional impact and for risk assessment) in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6 WGI). She is further co-chairing the Development Team for the Knowledge Action Network on Emergent Risks and Extreme Events (Risk-KAN).

Dr Sebastian Sippel is a climate-ecosystem researcher at the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research and ETH Zurich. His main research interests include the detection and attribution of climate change, and understanding extreme events and variability in the water and carbon cycle using statistical and machine learning techniques. In 2017, Sebastian successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Climate extremes and their impact on ecosystem-atmosphere interactions”, carried out jointly at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena and ETH Zurich. The thesis systematically explores the link between climate extremes and ecosystem impacts from both statistical-empirical and process-oriented modeling perspectives and was awarded with the Bernd Rendel Prize in Geoscience by the German Research Foundation.

Simone Russo has been a researcher for more than 15 years in the field of applied physics and statistic of extremes. He has a Ph.D in Applied Physics from Galileo Galilei school of the Pisa University (Italy). He has worked as research climatologist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI, De Bilt, Netherlands), at the Laboratoire de Physique des Océans (University of Brest, France) and at the Joint Research Centre (European Commission, Italy) focusing on modeling climate extremes and relative impacts. Today he is contracted as researcher at the Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (Ispra, Rome, Italy).